The dough through a plurality of dies simultaneously present invention relates to a manifold assembly for feeding dough through a plurality of dies simultaneously and, more particularly, such an assembly which feeds the dough under substantially equal pressure.
Twist stick cake donuts are manufactured in one of three alternative ways: by hand cutting strips of dough and manually twisting them to the desired shapes, performing the same manual twisting action on a conventional ring donut, or using the Frenchette machine. The Frenchette machine feeds extrudes two twisted ropes of dough into the frying fat of very narrow, dedicated fryer so that the twist stick products may be cut while in the frying fat. The cutting device of the Frenchette machine is mounted directly over the narrow dedicated fryer, and the rotary extrusion dies of the Frenchette machine are fed by fluted rollers in order to provide pressure to the dough for the purposes of extrusion through the dies.
Typically, the Frenchette machine has only two extrusion dies as it is impossible to provide uniformity of pressure at the exit end of the machine for more than two dies. The dough is fed in the Frenchette machine by fluted rollers which are notorious for producing a lack of uniformity when more than two dies are fed by them; indeed, it is even difficult to get uniformity across a Frenchette machine with only two dies if the dies are widely spaced apart. Attempts to overcome this disadvantage of the ordinary fluted rollers include the use of a double roller system having two sets of rollers, but this is cumbersome and mandates a large profile or footprint for the machine. Another approach has been to use specially design fluted rollers to compensate for the natural non-uniformity, but these are extremely expensive and must be specially designed for the machine.
Nonetheless, the Frenchette machine remains in use in the industry as the other machines employing fluted rollers to feed a multiplicity of dies do not produce a twist stick product.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a manifold assembly for feeding dough through a plurality of dies simultaneously under substantially equal pressure.
Another object is to provide such a manifold assembly which can be used to feed a multiplicity of dies greater than two.
A further object is to provide such a manifold assembly for use in manufacturing a twist stick product.
It is another object of the present invention to provide such a manifold assembly which is inexpensive to manufacture, simple and economical to use, and easy to maintain.